Canada

Lisgar Collegiate Institute in Ottawa

In Canada, collegiate institute has a specific meaning. In 1871,
the province of Ontario set
up two parallel secondary education systems.[1]
Collegiate institutes offered arts and humanities education,
including Greek and Latin, for university-bound students. High schools offered
vocational and science programs for those planning to enter the
workforce upon graduation. This system was later adopted by other
provinces including Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.

It was quite quickly realized that this division did not work
very well. Over time, high schools responded to students' needs and
increasingly offered the arts courses that were essential for the
workforce. At the same time, as universities began teaching science
and engineering, so did the collegiate institutes. Within a decade,
the distinctions between the two systems were greatly blurred, and
eventually the two systems were merged in to a single secondary
school system. All new Ontario schools were from then on named
either high schools or secondary schools, but the collegiate
institutes kept their names. Thus, in most cities, the oldest and
most established high schools are still known as collegiate
institutes. Most cities in Ontario have a collegiate institute near
the town centre. In some cases, a more academic focus has been
retained, and collegiate institutes are thus sometimes regarded as
better than "standard" high schools. Many of Ontario's most
prominent high schools are collegiate institutes, such as Lisgar Collegiate Institute
in Ottawa, as well as both Riverdale Collegiate
Institute and Malvern Collegiate
Institute in Toronto.

In western Canada, far fewer schools are known as collegiate
institutes, most having been closed or renamed in the decades since
the separate systems were abolished. In Saskatoon and Regina, however, the term
collegiate is still used to mean high school; all
public high schools and some Catholic high schools there are "Collegiates,"
including those recently built or recently opened. Outside of
Saskatoon, some remain such as Lethbridge Collegiate
Institute in Lethbridge, Alberta.

United
States

Pentecostal Collegiate Institute at the Rhode Island campus, c.
1905

In the United
States, the term has largely fallen into disuse. Collegiate
institutes in the United States were, for the most part, colleges, and even the first
name of Yale
University when founded in 1701 was a similar-sounding
Collegiate School. But the definition of a college in the
U.S. also differs from that of other countries, and has been primarily based on the liberal
arts college model of higher education. Two examples of
collegiate institutes in the United States before the term fell out
of use are the Oberlin Collegiate Institute of Ohio, now Oberlin College,[2] and the
Pentecostal Collegiate Institute of New York and Rhode Island, now the Eastern Nazarene College of Massachusetts.[3] Both
were founded as postsecondary institutions (in 1833 and
1900, respectively), but the latter would drop its college
curriculum and exist as a college preparatory school from 1902
until 1918, demonstrating the flexibility of the term
collegiate institute. Partly because the term institute holds some
ambiguity of its own and can denote either educational extreme,
from a pure research
institution to an unrecognised educational
institution, both schools would later change their names to use
college instead of collegiate institute (in 1850
and 1918, respectively, each after less than 20 years since its
founding) to more accurately represent their nature and mission, in
step with the trend that the term "collegiate institute" would see
little use beyond the early 20th century.